The study of the attitudes of Australian workplace participants has shown that companies that fail to keep up with community expectations about key issues like work-life balance and respectful and inclusive workplaces are at risk of lower productivity and higher staff turnover.

Some key findings

Managers with care-giving responsibilities are rated higher:

Their employees reported greater work-life satisfaction (51% extremely or very satisfied vs 42% of people whose manager had no care-giving responsibilities), greater access to flexibility, more positive work-life culture and their manager and co-workers being supportive of work-life (78% strongly or somewhat agreed vs 71% of people whose manager had no care-giving responsibilities).

Generic managerial capability is pretty good:

83% agreed their manager has expectations of their performance on the job that are realistic, 81% agreed their manager is supportive when they have a work problem and 79% agreed they keep them informed.

But managerial capability around part-time work is not as good:

Employees have to choose between advancing in their jobs or devoting time to personal life (51% strongly or somewhat agreed).

The advancement and growth of part-time employees is actively supported (55% strongly or somewhat disagreed with this statement).

Work-life is one of the top employment drivers:

Flexibility is more important for parents – it is the top employment driver (50% for parents vs 39% non-parents).

Almost one in five employees (18%) strongly agreed or somewhat agreed that they had considered resigning in the last six months due to lack of flexibility.

Paid parental leave is important in retention:

55% of women who had no paid parental leave were 'very likely' to make a genuine effort to look for another job versus 26% of women on full paid parental leave.

Flexibility satisfaction and dissatisfaction:

77% strongly/somewhat agreed they have the flexibility to manage personal/family responsibilities.

48% strongly/somewhat agreed that it was very difficult to work part-time and have a career in their organisation.

Gender matters with part-time work and parental leave:

People with male supervisors were less likely to agree that the advancement and growth of part-time employees is actively supported (50% vs 60% people with female supervisor).

Discrimination and having an inclusive, respectful culture:

High levels of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation were reported (16% gay employees and 8% bisexual employees vs 1% heterosexual employees).

Indigenous Australians were up to six times more likely to experience inappropriate workplace behaviour than non-Indigenous Australians.

People with disabilities were twice as likely to report having experienced an incident of discrimination (21% vs 9% people without disabilities).